Look for the Best and the Brightest Somewhere Else The idea that the national laboratories

are attracting, let alone have, the best minds in the nation is pure mythology. Show me the proof that the labs are attracting the best minds. What is most visible at the labs is the inferior and incorrect thinking and investigation about cleanup and ongoing worker, public and environmental exposure to hazardous contamination. Look at the expose of inferior lab science that has been brought to surface by Geologist Robert Gilkeson, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the EPA Kerr Lab and the National Academies of Science for both well monitoring and seismology problems at LANL and Sandia. The modern plutonium pit facility and other buildings at LANL are seismically unsafe and represent a risk to the community. Secret documents at the New Mexico Environment Department obtained by Citizen Action showed that the computer modeling program for contaminant flow at LANL was worthless. (Now why would NMED hide that document for years?) Over a hundred million dollars have been wasted on well monitoring networks at Sandia and LANL that can't detect contamination and fail to comply with federal law. Radioactive and hazardous waste dumps are leaking to the groundwater. The problems are national in scope and found at every single DOE national laboratory: Technetium-99 in the groundwater at the Idaho National Lab; Cesium137 and Strontium-90 in Columbia River and ocean fish from Hanford contamination; TCE, perchlorate and nitrate contamination in Albuquerque's groundwater from Sandia Labs' many unmonitored dumps; soil contamination from plutonium and beryllium at Lawrence Livermore; Uranium contamination at Fernald, Ohio. . Sandia Labs has an average age at death for its workers of about fifty years old for the last eight years and the deaths are 17% due to cancer. The best and the brightest don't want to be working in fifty year old sick buildings that expose them to arsenic, mercury, radiation, solvents and untimely death. We don't even need to get into a discussion of the attraction of brilliant minds to Albuquerque's crummy schools and the serial killers stalking women or the uranium miners dying around the state. The quality of scientists that want to be part of an organization that is managing a stockpile of useless weapons and can't get funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead is highly questionable. Private enterprise has been the moving force for renewable energy with cloudy Germany in the lead for solar technology. What the labs really fear and the reason they want to be under the Pentagon or an independent security organization is that they have a bloated budget and salaries supporting projects that they don't want the public to know about and

that are pretty much useless. But these jobs would then be as good as the Halliburton "no bid" contracts. Hiding behind the veil of "national security" they will once again be able to immunize themselves from the scrutiny of the Freedom of Information Act. What the public needs is protection from the proliferation of hazardous and radioactive waste from the terrorists working at our national laboratories. Take a look at what these scientific morons are continuing to expose our communities to -- open air burning and detonations of highly toxic waste, a fifty year history of contamination they haven't cleaned up, ongoing unmonitored operations that are still releasing exotic chemicals and radiation into our communities, a plutonium pit facility, plans for new reactors and spent fuel reprocessing when there still is no solution for the disposal of wastes at the back end or front end of the nuclear fuel cycle and for which mega subsidies and insurance immunity are necessary. Where is their intelligent design for controlling the gasses and residues from open burning/detonation as an opener? Don't tell me these are the best and the brightest. Where is the cure for the cancers and disease they've caused around the country and any thought about protection of the gene pool for future generations? Hanging onto the labs just because billions of dollars are being brought to New Mexico with the aid of a loosey-goosey state regulator and with the condition of renewed secrecy for programs that may well continue to expose New Mexicans to new hazards from secret testing is not worth the threat to OUR security and safety. Dave McCoy